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MLM Mayhem Year in Review [2014 Edition]

It's that time again––that time where I use a post to promote the most popular posts of the year, thus saving me from the hard work of creating something new. 2014 was a year where MLM Mayhem witnessed less posts than usual (around 20 less than 2013), partially because of living disruptions and the fact that we took our daughter out of daycare in September, meaning more domestic responsibilities (a toddler is exhausting!). There's also the fact that I was able to release a book this year, which also took up a lot of time during the hours I might have spent blogging.

I never tire of this shit!

In any case, here is a list of the blogposts that were the most popular (and/or controversial) in 2014…

A close contender to an earlier and less popular post about internet leftism, and in some ways a more thorough companion piece to that rant. After all, as I recall, some people were offended by my post about internet leftism (most probably leftists whose only activity was online), so this was the post that was meant to provide a general contextual critique about the way in which revolution is approached by marxists in the first world. Honestly, this post was inspired by interactions with marxists whose only avenue of agitation/"organization" seemed to be online avenues.

It was nice to see that a review of a book, and thus a promotion of someone else's intellectual labour, made it into the top ten posts of 2014. Sometimes when I write reviews of books I read and think are important I worry whether people will read them and become interested in the books in question. Hopefully this review helped sell Bromma's small book, particularly since I ended up writing a follow-up meta-review regarding Stephen D'arcy's straw-person critique of the book. (Yes, I know that D'arcy wrote a response to my response, but I figure it's best to allow him the last word, as problematical as it might be, because I was the one who picked the proverbial fight.)

A post about the discourse, quite common amongst the mainstream left, that "capitalism is broken." Unfortunately, the title is also "broken" since, in order to be accurate, it should read capitalism works but that is the problem.

A response to Zak Brown's critique of the strategic theory of PPW, focused on one of my blog posts this year [see (4) below] rather than earlier posts or the theoretical work from which I was drawing. Since this response, Brown has written another reply but I haven't had the energy or desire to respond, mainly because I felt it avoided the crux of the matter and trammelled off into red herring territory that might or might not be post-marxist. But your first encounter with Deleuze and Guattari can do that to you, no?

Written during the most recent assaults on the so-called "occupied territories" (as if all of Palestine is not an occupied territory) and determined by my annoyance that, despite the fact that it was normative in Israel to make genocidal proclamations about the Palestinians, liberal commentators who were also upset by these assaults were still talking about anti-semitic actions in the first world in connection to this event. To be fair, though, there are the odd pseudo-leftists who show up, mainly online, to spout anti-semitic shit and pretend that makes them pro-Palestinian (like that revisionist asshole on /r/communism who the moderators ban all the time, but who keeps coming back with his weird concoction of anti-Maoist but oddly third worldist lingo, complete with homophobic and sexist language, spouting garbage about jewish controlled media and what-not)… Even still, the point is that these people in the left are so marginal and so ineffective, especially in comparison to the machine that is deciding the Palestinian population should be obliterated.

Based on the sudden popularity of Thomas Piketty despite the fact that his book says nothing as interesting or even close to scientific as Capital. Why is it that these repackaging of Keynesian economics are popular? Because they ameliorate class struggle.

A rant about the inability to think through the theory of strategy, often pretending that theories of organization are the same, with the macguffin of PPW. Inspired Zak Brown's critique [see (7) above], mistaking this as a post that was theorizing protracted peoples war.

Some reflections on a question from a comment string about whether socialism would require a repressive state apparatus, why this would be the case, and how. I probably pissed a lot of anarchists off with this post… although, to be fair, this does provide a significant demarcating line between communism and anarchism.

A general delineation between proletarian feminism and radical feminism, particularly since some attempts to cognize proletarian feminism (due to the recent emergence of the term) have fallen back on the categories of radical feminism. This post was meant as a follow up from the most popular post of the year…

Which really annoyed some readers, particularly those who wanted their proletarian feminism to mean liberal feminism. One of the commentators tried to summon the experience of revolutionary Filipino mass orgs to contradict the position I was expressing only to be smacked down by a commentator from the Filipino revolutionary circles who challenged their claim. Since that claim was challenged, I haven't heard from that commentator since. Whatever the case, these last two posts are interesting in light of the recent debate between MIM-Prisons and the LLCO about this kind of thing.

So that's it for 2014… Hopefully 2015 will provide more significant entries and less rants, but no promises––maybe I'll write some more cartoons! Thanks to all my regular readers and supporters. Happy hegemonic new year and don't be a stranger.